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    Biden’s Reluctant Approach to Free Trade Draws Backlash

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    A law intended to bolster clean energy manufacturing has ignited debate over whether the U.S. should work to break down international trade barriers — or keep them intact to protect American workers.WASHINGTON — Since President Biden came into office two years ago, the United States has declined to pursue new comprehensive free-trade agreements with other countries, arguing that most Americans have turned against the kind of pacts that promote global commerce but that also help to send factory jobs overseas.But in recent months, with the rollout of a sweeping climate bill intended to bolster clean energy manufacturing, the lack of free-trade agreements with some of America’s closest allies has suddenly become a major headache for the administration.The dispute, which centers on which countries can receive benefits under the Inflation Reduction Act, has caused significant rifts with foreign governments and drawn blowback from Congress. And it is helping to reignite a debate over whether the United States should be working to break down trade barriers with other countries — or keep them intact in an attempt to protect American workers.The law as written offers tax credits for electric vehicles that are built in North America or that are made with battery minerals from the United States and countries with which it has a free-trade agreement.Those provisions have angered allies in Europe and elsewhere that, despite close ties with America, do not actually have free-trade agreements with the United States. They have complained that companies in their countries would be put at a disadvantage to U.S. firms that can receive the subsidies. To soothe relations, the Biden administration has developed a complicated workaround, in which it is signing limited new trade deals with Japan and the European Union.But that solution has vexed lawmakers of both parties, who say that these agreements are not valid and that the administration needs to ask Congress to approve the kind of free-trade agreement the law envisions.“It’s a fix,” said Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in trade, adding that they were not free-trade agreements “by any reasonable definition of the term.”The World Trade Organization defines a free-trade agreement as covering “substantially all trade” between countries. In the United States, such broad agreements need the approval of Congress, though the executive branch has the authority to negotiate much narrower agreements.Administration officials argue that because the Inflation Reduction Act does not define the term “free-trade agreement,” these narrower pacts are allowed. But in hearings before the House and the Senate last month, lawmakers criticized the administration for bypassing Congress in making these agreements.Some lawmakers argued for more traditional free-trade deals, while others voiced support for new deals with higher labor and environmental standards, like the North American agreement Congress approved in 2020.In hearings, Katherine Tai, the U.S. trade representative, highlighted efforts to raise global labor standards and decarbonize industries, and said she and her colleagues were “writing a new story on trade.”Mariam Zuhaib/Associated PressIn her opening statement at the hearings, Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, set out a vision for a trade policy that was different from those of previous administrations, focused more on defending American workers from unfair foreign competition than opening up global markets. Ms. Tai said she and her colleagues were “writing a new story on trade” that would put working families first and reflect the interests of a wider cross section of Americans.Speaking before the Senate on Thursday, Ms. Tai said she remained “open minded” about doing more trade agreements if they would help address the challenges the country has today.The Biden administration has long insisted that past approaches to trade policy — in which other countries gained access to the U.S. market through low or zero tariffs — ended up hurting American workers and enriching multinational companies, which simply moved U.S. jobs and factories overseas. In contrast, Biden officials have pledged to strengthen the economy and to make the country more competitive with China by expanding the country’s infrastructure and manufacturing, rather than negotiating new trade deals.The administration is currently negotiating trade frameworks for the Indo-Pacific region and the Americas, and is engaging in trade talks with Taiwan, Kenya and other governments. But, to the dissatisfaction of some lawmakers in both parties, none of these agreements are expected to involve significantly opening up foreign markets by lowering tariffs, as more traditional trade deals have done..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Representative Adrian Smith, a Nebraska Republican who leads the House Ways and Means trade subcommittee, said in the hearing that he was concerned the United States had “lost momentum on trade” even as China continued to aggressively broaden its own partnerships.“I cannot express strongly enough,” he added, “that the administration cannot just come up with new definitions of what a trade agreement is for some reason, and certainly not to give handouts for electric vehicles.”“You have to appreciate that we live in a very different world,” Ms. Tai responded. She said the Biden administration sought to adapt its policies to respond “to the world we’re living in, and not the world that we want to live in.”Part of the pressure stems from the fact that other countries — including China — are continuing to pursue more traditional trade deals that lower their tariffs with trading partners, giving their companies an advantage over businesses based elsewhere. On Friday, British officials announced that they had reached an agreement to join a Pacific trade pact that, despite being devised by the Obama administration, does not include the United States.Membership in the so-called Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership will allow Britain to export products tariff-free to 11 other countries. With the inclusion of Britain, the pact will represent 15 percent of the global economy, British officials said.Jake Colvin, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a U.S. group that lobbies on behalf of major multinational companies, called the news “a stark reminder that the world isn’t waiting for the United States.”“While we congratulate the U.K. government for being part of this massive agreement, it’s frustrating to see America’s allies writing global rules and creating new market opportunities without the United States,” he said.Politicians of both parties have found support for free-trade agreements to be controversial in the United States in recent years. The Trans-Pacific Partnership — the original deal negotiated by the Obama administration with 11 other nations circling the Pacific Ocean — received criticism from labor unions and other progressive Democrats who said it would ship jobs overseas. Hillary Clinton opposed it as a candidate in the 2016 presidential election.As president, Donald J. Trump also criticized the deal and officially withdrew the United States from it in 2017. He also scrapped a negotiation over a comprehensive trade deal the Obama administration had been carrying out with the European Union.The Biden administration is trying to reach trade frameworks for the Indo-Pacific region and the Americas, but none of these agreements are expected to involve significantly opening up foreign markets by lowering tariffs.Coley Brown for The New York TimesMr. Trump went on to sign a series of limited trade deals with Japan and China without congressional approval. He also oversaw an update to the North American Free Trade Agreement that was ratified by Congress, which he named the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement.Democrats also came to support that deal after adding significant protections for workers and the environment.Some trade experts have speculated that the Biden administration will try to build on the success of the U.S.M.C.A. by adding more nations to the pact, or by applying its terms to negotiations elsewhere. But so far, the Biden administration has not announced any such plans.Two top Democratic lawmakers focused on trade issued a statement last week criticizing the limited agreement the Biden administration had signed with Japan and urging officials to try to replicate the success of the U.S.M.C.A. by working with Congress to draft new deals with enforceable environmental and labor protections.“U.S.M.C.A. is a prime example of what’s possible when the executive and Congress collaborate, and its enforcement mechanisms should be the floor for future agreements,” Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat of Oregon who leads the Finance Committee, said in the statement.Republicans have also been split over how aggressively to pursue new free-trade agreements. More traditional free-traders — like those from agricultural states that depend on exporting goods overseas — have been at odds with a growing populist contingent that favors industrial policy and trade barriers to protect American workers.Still, Kelly Ann Shaw, a partner with Hogan Lovells in Washington and a former economic adviser to the Trump administration, said that “the amount of inaction by the administration is doing a lot to unify Republicans” around pursuing more free-trade deals.“If you would ask me two years ago, I would have thought that Republicans were more split on this issue than they really are,” she said. “But it’s pretty clear that we’re losing out on opportunities by sitting on our hands and doing nothing.” More

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    How Far Can Regulators Go to Protect Uninsured Deposits?

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    A decision by federal regulators to ensure that depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank did not lose money regardless of how much they had in their accounts, has aroused populist anger as well as questions of what government agencies can and cannot do to protect uninsured accounts.Under current law, the government insures bank deposits only up to $250,000. Any increase in that limit would require congressional authorization. But regulators can protect deposits over that amount, like they did at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, if they determine that the banks’ failures pose a systemic risk.They can also request approval from Congress to temporarily raise the cap or eliminate it altogether, though some lawmakers have already expressed unwillingness to do so.Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, suggested last week that regulators were ready to make uninsured depositors at other banks whole if necessary and “if smaller institutions suffer deposit runs that pose the risk of contagion.”Amid widespread bank failures in the Great Depression, Congress created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 1933 to insure deposits under $2,500. It has increased that limit over the years, recently lifting it to $250,000 from $100,000 for IRAs in 2006 and for checking accounts in 2008. The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 made the increase permanent.In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, the F.D.I.C. evoked the systemic risk exception to create a program that guaranteed new debt issued by banks for three years and insured all deposits if they did not bear interest (typically, accounts used by businesses for payroll).The decision to grant the exception was reached “after three days of intense negotiation,” according to an account of the episode by the F.D.I.C.’s historian, and had to be approved by the Treasury secretary in consultation with the president and two-thirds of the boards of both the F.D.I.C. and the Federal Reserve.But regulators no longer have the ability to create such a program unilaterally, as the Dodd-Frank Act eliminated the F.D.I.C.’s authority to temporarily insure accounts with more assets than the statutory limit. Under that law, the agency can only do so if it is the receiver of a failed bank or if it has approval from Congress.“Congress was so concerned with moral hazard and ‘bailouts’ that it seemed to limit the receipt of F.D.I.C. assistance to the imposition of an F.D.I.C. receivership, unless Congress specifically approved a subsequent F.D.I.C. alternative,” said Jeffrey N. Gordon, a law professor at Columbia University and expert on financial regulation.During the coronavirus pandemic, Congress in 2020 temporarily lifted the deposit limit on noninterest bearing accounts. But in congressional testimony last week, Ms. Yellen said her agency was not seeking to lift the cap altogether and insure all deposits over $250,000. Rather, she said, regulators would seek the systemic risk exception for failed banks through a “case-by-case determination.”Others, though, have pushed for more sweeping coverage. Some lawmakers are considering temporarily increasing the deposit cap while others have proposed eliminating it altogether.The Dodd-Frank Act provides a fast-track process for such requests, allowing the Congress to expedite approval by adopting a joint resolution. Sheila Blair, the former president of the F.D.I.C. during the financial crisis, recently urged Congress to initiate the procedure.“We want people to make payroll. We want people to be able to pay their businesses and others to pay their bills. So I think that is one area where unlimited coverage, at least on a temporary basis, makes a lot of sense,” she said in a Washington Post event last week.News reports have also suggested that regulators are looking at other mechanisms of acting without Congress, specifically by tapping into the Exchange Stabilization Fund. The Treasury secretary has broad authority to use the emergency reserve, which was created in 1934 to stabilize the value of the dollar but has been used over the years for a host of other purposes.Mr. Gordon noted that using the exchange fund alone would not work to protect uninsured deposits, given that it is “paltry compared to the Deposit Insurance Fund and unlike the D.I.F. has no mechanism for replenishment.” But he said it would be possible to use the fund as a backstop in a program operated by the Federal Reserve that lends against bank assets.“What this means is that banks would have an easy way to raise cash to pay off all deposits,” he said. More

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    Double-Barreled Economic Threat Puts Congress on Edge

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    Republicans and Democrats disagree over how recent bank closures should impact the debt limit stalemate, and have taken divergent lessons from past economic crises.WASHINGTON — In 2008, an imminent collapse of the banking system consumed Congress before lawmakers delivered a bailout. Three years later, a debt limit crisis enveloped Washington and led to a series of spending cuts after a dangerous brush with default and a first-ever downgrade in the nation’s credit rating.Now unease about the banking system’s stability and a stalemate over raising the debt limit are engulfing the capital simultaneously, ratcheting up an already high level of financial anxiety as two economic challenges Congress has experienced before become intertwined.“The stakes are exceptionally high when you are dealing with what amounts to a one-two punch of economic peril,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. “The messages that you send to the economy and the public with respect to banking and the full faith and credit of the United States — it doesn’t get more consequential than that.”Republicans and Democrats acknowledge it is a scary case of déjà vu times two. But they diverge sharply on how recent bank failures — and uncertainty over how Congress should respond to them, if at all — will influence the debt limit fight later this summer.At their just-concluded retreat in Florida, House Republicans took the line that shakiness in the banking system should strengthen their hand in the coming showdown over the debt limit. They argued that a Democrat-led spending spree spurred inflation, forced up interest rates and led to a precarious situation for all but the largest banks. The clear answer, to them, remains deep spending cuts, and they say they will still insist on cuts before making any move to raise the debt ceiling.Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Tuesday that the president was willing to talk federal spending with Republicans, just not under the threat of a debt default.Pete Marovich for The New York Times“That should wake everybody up,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, told reporters on Tuesday when asked about the intersection of banking stability and the debt limit. “Why are we having a crisis? Because the government spent too much and created inflation.”“I believe to get to a debt ceiling limit, you have to be spending less than we spent before,” he said.But Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, on Wednesday disputed the notion that spending remained the chief driver of inflation.“Spending was of course tremendously high during the pandemic,” he said at a news conference announcing an increase in interest rates. “As pandemic programs rolled off, spending actually came down.”“Fiscal impulse is actually not what’s driving inflation right now,” he said. “It was at the beginning perhaps, but that’s not the story right now.”Democrats say House Republicans are doing the exact opposite of what is required at a critical moment, even as the Fed offers assurances about the soundness of the banking system. They say the fallout from any banking instability should persuade Republicans that the last thing the economy needs is the specter of a default from a failure to raise the debt limit, which is projected to be reached as early as July without action by Congress.Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, on Wednesday assailed the Republican stance as “reckless and truly clueless.”.css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“Instead of calling for calm, House Republicans are sowing chaos by threatening a default at a time when banks need stability,” he said. “The right answer is for Republicans in the House to stop saber-rattling, drop the hostage-taking and brinkmanship and work together, work in a bipartisan way, to extend the debt ceiling without strings attached.”Other Democrats shared those sentiments, dismissing calls from some Republicans to prioritize federal payments should Congress fail to agree on a debt-limit increase. They say that approach is unworkable and default by another name.“The banking crisis highlights the importance of paying our bills on time,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Banking Committee. “We don’t want to create any more uncertainty in the financial markets and the economy. Because of what happened with the banks, it is more important than ever that Republicans don’t allow us to get close to the cliff.”“Because of what happened with the banks, it is more important than ever that Republicans don’t allow us to get close to the cliff,” said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesThe 2008 and 2011 economic crises were earthshaking events on Capitol Hill. In the fall of 2008, in response to warnings from Treasury and Fed officials that the nation’s banks were about go under, Congress dove into a titanic, market-rattling debate over the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, ultimately approving a historic government intervention in the economy.Three years later, a new House Republican majority and the Obama administration took their clash over spending to the brink of financial ruin, bringing the country close to a federal default before striking a last-minute deal on spending cuts cleared the way for an increase in the debt ceiling, averting disaster.Lawmakers say they drew many lessons from those painful experiences. But the two parties did not draw the same ones.For Democrats, the 2011 experience hardened their opposition to negotiating over increasing the debt limit, confirming their belief that it should be raised without conditions since it is simply making good on spending already approved by Congress, with the support of members of both political parties. Republicans, by contrast, say that same experience persuaded them that the only way to exact real spending cuts is to use the threat of a federal debt default as leverage.The clashing approaches now have the parties again dug in over increasing the debt limit. Scant progress has been made toward finding a resolution that could avoid undermining the economy, even as the banking system exhibits signs of stress.Some Republicans say that they see the high-profile failure of the Silicon Valley Bank as an isolated incident, in contrast to the widespread fear of a total banking collapse in 2008 before Congress intervened.“This is not ’08 and ’09 when the banking industry was crazy on their asset side,” said Senator Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana. “That side of the economy I think learned its lesson.”He and other Republicans said they need to continue to push for spending reductions as part of any agreement to raise the debt limit and called on Democrats and President Biden to drop their refusal to negotiate.“This is not just a one-way street,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “Hopefully Biden and the administration will get real when it comes to negotiating something, rather than saying, ‘I am not going to negotiate anything.’”In an appearance on Tuesday before the American Bankers Association, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said that the president was willing to talk federal spending with Republicans, just not with the debt limit sword held at his throat.“Having this conversation needs to happen over time and in the appropriations process and not through the threat of forcing a default,” she told members of the group. “It is essential that Congress raise the debt ceiling and that they do it promptly in order not to inflict a truly catastrophic wound on our economy and our financial system.”Republicans and Democrats credit consumer confidence for holding off economic calamity and so far preventing Congress from entering the crisis atmosphere that permeated both 2008 and 2011. But there is no guarantee that confidence can be maintained, and lawmakers warn of the possibility of cascading events should the banking system become viewed as unstable or the debt limit standoff go on too long.“It has,” warned Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, “the makings of a perfect storm.” More

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    Push to Insure Big Deposits Percolates on Capitol Hill

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    The government insures only deposits of less than $250,000, but there is precedent for lifting that cap amid turmoil. It could happen again.WASHINGTON — Lawmakers are looking for ways to resolve a major concern that threatens to keep the banking industry in turmoil: The federal government insures bank deposits only up to $250,000.Some members of Congress are looking for ways to boost that cap, at least temporarily, in order to stop depositors from pulling their money out of smaller institutions that have been at center of recent bank runs.Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, and other lawmakers are in talks about introducing bipartisan legislation as early as this week that would temporarily increase the deposit cap on transaction accounts, which are used for activities like payroll, with an eye on smaller banks. Such a move would potentially reprise a playbook used during the 2008 financial crisis and authorized at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 to prevent depositors from pulling their money out.Others, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, have suggested lifting the deposit cap altogether.Any broad expansion to deposit insurance could require action from Congress because of legal changes made after the 2008 financial crisis, unless government agencies can find a workaround. The White House has not taken a public position, instead emphasizing the tools it has already rolled out to address banking troubles.Many lawmakers have yet to solidify their positions, and some have openly opposed lifting the cap, so it is not clear that legislation adjusting it even temporarily would pass. While such a move could calm nervous depositors, it could have drawbacks, including removing a big disincentive for banks to take on too much risk.Still, Senate staff members from both parties have been in early conversations about whether it would make sense to resurrect some version of the previous guarantees for uninsured deposits, according to a person familiar with the talks.Even after two weeks of aggressive government action to shore up the banking system, jitters remain about its safety after high-profile bank failures. Some worry that depositors whose accounts exceed the $250,000 limit may pull their money from smaller banks that seem more likely to crash without a government rescue. That could drive people toward bigger banks that are perceived as more likely to have a government guarantee — spurring more industry concentration.“I’m concerned about the danger to regional banking and community banking in this country,” Mr. Khanna said in an interview. He noted that if regional banks lose deposits as people turn to giant banking institutions that are deemed too big to fail, it could make it harder to get loans and other financing in the middle of the country, where community and regional banks play a major role.“This should be deeply concerning, that our regional banks are losing deposits, and losing the ability to lend, he said.Representative Ro Khanna said broad temporary expansions to deposit insurance would likely require action from Congress.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesIf passed, a temporary guarantee on transaction deposits over the $250,000 federal insurance cap would be the latest step in a sweeping government response to an unfolding banking disaster.Silicon Valley Bank’s failure on March 10 has rattled the banking system. The bank was ill prepared to contend with the Federal Reserve’s interest rate increases: It held a lot of long-term bonds that had declined in value as well as an outsize share of uninsured deposits, which tend to be withdrawn at the first sign of trouble.Still, its demise focused attention on other weak spots in finance. Signature Bank has also failed, and First Republic Bank has been imperiled by outflows of deposits and a plunging stock price. In Europe, the Swiss government had to engineer the takeover of Credit Suisse by its competitor UBS.The U.S. government has responded to the turmoil with a volley of action. On March 12 it announced that it would guarantee the big depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature. The Federal Reserve announced that it would set up an emergency lending program to make sure that banks had a workaround to avoid recognizing big losses if they — as Silicon Valley Bank did — needed to raise cash to cover withdrawals.And on Sunday, the Fed announced that it was making its regular operations to keep dollar financing flowing around the world more frequent, to try to prevent problems from extending to financial markets.For now, the administration has stressed that it will use the tools it is already deploying to protect depositors and ensure a healthy regional and community banking system.“We will use the tools we have to support community banks,” Michael Kikukawa, a White House spokesman, said Monday. “Since our administration and the regulators took decisive action last weekend, we have seen deposits stabilize at regional banks throughout the country, and, in some cases, outflows have modestly reversed.”The midsize Bank Coalition of America has urged federal regulators to extend Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation protection to all deposits for the next two years, saying in a letter late last week that it would halt an “exodus” of deposits from smaller banks.“It would be prudent to take further action,” Mr. Khanna said.Yet not even all banking groups agree that such a step is necessary, especially given that a higher insurance cap might incite more regulation or lead to higher fees.The midsize Bank Coalition of America has urged federal regulators to extend F.D.I.C. insurance to all deposits for the next two years.Al Drago for The New York TimesLifting the deposit cap temporarily could send a signal that the problem is worse than it is, said Anne Balcer, senior executive vice president of the Independent Community Bankers of America, a trade group for small U.S. banks. She said many of its member banks were seeing an increase in deposits.“Right now, we’re in a phase of let’s exercise restraint,” she said.There is precedent for temporarily expanding deposit insurance. In March 2020, Congress’s first major coronavirus relief package authorized the F.D.I.C. to temporarily lift the insurance cap on deposits.And in 2008, as panic coursed across Wall Street at the outset of the global financial crisis, the F.D.I.C. created a program that allowed for unlimited deposit insurance for transaction accounts that chose to join the program in exchange for an added fee.Peter Conti-Brown, a financial historian and a legal scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, said the 2010 Dodd-Frank law ended the option for the agencies to temporarily insure larger transaction accounts the way they did in 2008.Now, he said, the regulators would either need congressional approval, or lawmakers would have to pass legislation to enable such a broad-based backstop for deposits. While regulators were able to step in and promise to protect depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, that is because the collapse at those banks was deemed to have the potential to cause broad problems across the financial system.For smaller banks, where failures would be much less likely to have systemwide implications, that means that uninsured depositors might not receive the same kind of protection in a pinch.In a nod to those worries, Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, suggested on Tuesday that even smaller banks could warrant a “systemic” classification in some cases, allowing the agencies to backstop their deposits.“The steps we took were not focused on aiding specific banks or classes of banks,” Ms. Yellen said in a speech. “And similar actions could be warranted if smaller institutions suffer deposit runs that pose the risk of contagion.”But the chances that such an approach — or another workaround that allows the government to take the action without passing legislation, such as tapping a pot of money at the Treasury called the Exchange Stabilization Fund — would be effective are not yet clear.Sheila Bair, who was chair of the F.D.I.C. from 2006 to 2011, said she thought that the Biden administration should propose legislation that would let the F.D.I.C. reconstitute a bigger deposit insurance program and use a “fast-track” legislative process to put it in place.While Dodd-Frank curbed the ability of the F.D.I.C. to restart the transaction account guarantee program on its own, it did provide for a streamlined process for future lawmakers to get it up and running again, she said.“I hope the president asks for it; I think it would settle things down pretty quickly,” Ms. Bair said in an interview. But some warned that enacting broad-based deposit insurance could set a dangerous precedent: signaling to bank managers that they can take risks unchecked, and leading to calls for more regulation to protect taxpayers from potential costs.Aaron Klein, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, said he would oppose even a revamp of the 2008 deposit insurance because he thought it would be temporary in name only: It would reassert to big depositors that the government will come to the rescue.“If we think the market is going to believe that these things are temporary when they are constantly done in times of crisis,” he said, “then we’re deluding ourselves.”Alan Rappeport More

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    Biden Asks Congress for New Tools to Target Executives of Failed Banks

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    The request is a response to the federal rescue of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, and it seeks to impose new fines and other penalties.WASHINGTON — President Biden asked Congress on Friday to pass legislation to give financial regulators broad new powers to claw back ill-gotten gains from the executives of failed banks and impose fines for failures.The proposal, a response to the federal rescue of depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank last week, would also seek to bar executives at failed banks from taking other jobs in the financial industry.The measures contained in Mr. Biden’s plan would build on existing regulatory powers held by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Administration officials were still weighing on Friday whether to ask Congress for further changes to financial regulation in the days to come.“Strengthening accountability is an important deterrent to prevent mismanagement in the future,” Mr. Biden said in a statement released by the White House.“When banks fail due to mismanagement and excessive risk taking, it should be easier for regulators to claw back compensation from executives, to impose civil penalties, and to ban executives from working in the banking industry again,” he said, adding that Congress would have to pass legislation to make that possible.“The law limits the administration’s authority to hold executives responsible,” he said.One plank of the proposal would broaden the F.D.I.C.’s ability to seek the return of compensation from executives of failed banks, in response to reports that the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank sold $3 million in shares of the bank shortly before federal regulators took it over a week ago. Regulators’ current clawback powers are limited to the largest banks; Mr. Biden would expand them to cover banks the size of Signature and Silicon Valley Bank.In a contrast with top Silicon Valley Bank officials, a senior Signature Bank executive and one of its board members bought shares in the firm’s stock last Friday while it was experiencing a run, regulatory filings show. Signature’s chairman, Scott Shay, bought 5,000 shares of Signature stock while one of its directors, Michael Pappagallo, bought 1,500 shares.The president is also asking Congress to lower a legal bar that the F.D.I.C. must clear in order to bar an executive from a failed bank from working elsewhere in the financial industry. That ability currently applies only to executives who engage in “willful or continuing disregard for the safety and soundness” of their institutions. He is similarly seeking to broaden the agency’s ability to impose fines on executives whose actions contribute to the failure of their banks.The proposals face an uncertain future in Congress. Republicans control the House and have opposed other pushes by Mr. Biden to strengthen federal regulations. A 2018 law to roll back some of the regulations on banking that were approved after the 2008 financial crisis passed the House and Senate with bipartisan support.Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, faulted Mr. Biden’s focus on regulation and indicated that he would not support any move to impose new rules on the banking sector.“What we don’t need is more onerous regulations on well-managed and sound Montana banks that didn’t fail,” Mr. Daines said in a statement on Friday evening.Democrats were far more vocal in supporting the call for new rules. The chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, said in a statement emailed to reporters that regulators needed “stronger rules to rein in risky behavior and catch incompetence.”He added that in addition to executives who had failed at their duties, there should be a way to hold accountable the “regulators tasked with overseeing them.”In a letter to the chairs of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the F.D.I.C. and the Fed, Representative Maxine Waters, a Democrat from California, asked the regulators to use the “maximum extent” of their current powers to hold both banks’ senior executives and board directors accountable.She added that the Dodd-Frank law enacted after the 2008 financial crisis had given agencies more powers than they had yet used to tie executive compensation in the financial industry to successful risk management strategies.“While I am moving quickly to develop legislation on clawbacks and other matters arising from the collapse, it is critical that your agencies act now to investigate these bank failures and use the available enforcement tools you have to hold executives fully accountable for any wrongful activity,” she wrote. More

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    French Protesters Rally in Last Angry Push Before Pension Bill Vote

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    Many believe the legislation to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62 will pass Parliament, and they are looking beyond the vote to fight on.PARIS — Hundreds of thousands of French protesters on Wednesday swarmed cities across the country, and striking workers disrupted rail lines and closed schools to protest the government’s plan to raise the legal retirement age, in a final show of force before the contested bill comes to a vote on Thursday.The march — the eighth such national mobilization in two months — and strikes embodied the showdown between two apparently unyielding forces: President Emmanuel Macron, who has been unwavering in his resolve to overhaul pensions, and large crowds of protesters who have vowed to continue the fight even if the bill to raise the retirement age to 64 from 62 passes Parliament — which many believe it will.“Macron has not listened to us, and I’m no longer willing to listen to him,” said Patrick Agman, 59, who was marching in Paris on Wednesday. “I don’t see any other option than blocking the country now.”But it remains unclear what shape the protest movement will take from here, with plenty of room for it either to turn into the kind of unbridled social unrest that France has experienced before or to slowly die out.Even as throngs marched in cities from Le Havre in Normandy to Nice on the French Riviera on Wednesday, a joint committee of lawmakers from both houses of Parliament agreed on a joint version of the pension bill, sending it to a vote on Thursday.While it remained unclear if Mr. Macron had gathered enough support from outside his centrist political party to secure the vote, the prime minister could still use a special constitutional power to push the bill through without a ballot. It’s a tool the government used to pass a budget bill in the fall, but it risks exposing it to a no-confidence motion.Although many French people surveyed expect the bill to pass, opponents of the legislation signaled they intended to keep fighting.Laurent Cipriani/Associated PressIn a sense, the demonstrations on Wednesday were a last call to try to prevent the bill from becoming law. “It’s the last cry, to tell Parliament to not vote for this reform,” Laurent Berger, the head of the country’s largest union, the French Democratic Confederation of Labor, said at the march in Paris.Three-quarters of French people believe the bill will pass, according to a study released by the polling firm Ellabe on Wednesday. And many protesters were looking beyond the vote, convinced that a new wave of demonstrations could force the government to withdraw the law after it is passed.Some teachers said they had already given notice of another strike to their principals. Others said they had saved money in anticipation of future strike-related wage losses.“The goal is really to hold on as long as possible,” said Bénédicte Pelvet, 26, who was demonstrating while holding a cardboard box in which she was collecting money to support striking train workers.All along the march route in Paris, colorful signs, banners and graffiti echoed the determination to continue the fight regardless of the consequences. “Even if it’s with garbage, we’ll get out of this mess,” red graffiti on a wall read, a reference to the heaps of trash that have piled up throughout cities in France because garbage workers have gone on strike.Rémy Boulanger, 56, who has participated in all eight national demonstrations against the pension bill, said anger had grown among protesters toward a government that he said “has turned a deaf ear to our demands.”France relies on payroll taxes to fund the pension system. Mr. Macron has long argued that people must work longer to support retirees who are living longer. But his opponents say the plan will unfairly affect blue-collar workers, who have shorter life expectancies, and they point to other funding solutions, such as taxing the rich.A strike by garbage workers has led to a pileup of trash on French streets.Christophe Archambault/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAbout 70 percent of French people want the protests to continue, and four out of 10 say they should intensify, according to the Ellabe poll.Union leaders have hinted that the mobilization would not stop, but they have yet to reveal their plans. “It’s never too late to be in the street,” Philippe Martinez, the head of the far-left C.G.T union, said on Wednesday.France has a long history of street demonstrations as a means to win, or block, changes. Most recently, the Yellow Vest movement that was born in 2018 led to demonstrations that went on for months and forced the government to withdraw plans to raise fuel taxes. But the last time the French government bowed to demonstrators and withdrew a law that had already passed was in 2006, when a contested youth-jobs contract was repealed.“Redoing 2006 would be ideal,” Mr. Boulanger said. But he acknowledged that a sense of fatigue was spreading among protesters — Wednesday’s protests were smaller than those a week ago. He said he was instead looking to the next presidential election, more than four years away, to bring about change.Other protesters pointed to 1995, when strikes against another pension bill paralyzed France for weeks, forcing the government to abandon its plan to send the proposed law to a vote.Ms. Pelvet, another demonstrator, acknowledged that the unions’ vow to bring the country “to a standstill” last week had failed, with a fair number of trains and public services still operating.“Nobody wants to go home,” Ms. Pelvet said. “But the road ahead is not clear yet.”Catherine Porter More

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    After SVB Collapse, Fed and Lawmakers Eye Bank Rules

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    The stunning demise of Silicon Valley Bank has spurred soul-searching about how large and regional banks are overseen.The Federal Reserve is facing criticism over Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, with lawmakers and financial regulation experts asking why the regulator failed to catch and stop seemingly obvious risks. That concern is galvanizing a review of how the central bank oversees financial institutions — one that could end in stricter rules for a range of banks.In particular, the episode could result in meaningful regulatory and supervisory changes for institutions — like Silicon Valley Bank — that are large but not large enough to be considered globally systemic and thus subject to tougher oversight and rules. Smaller banks face lighter regulations than the largest ones, which go through regular and extensive tests of their financial health and have to more closely police how much easy-to-tap cash they have to serve as a buffer in times of crisis.Regulators and lawmakers are focused both on whether a deregulatory push in 2018, during the Trump administration, went too far, and on whether existing rules are sufficient in a changing world.While it is too early to predict the outcome, the shock waves that Silicon Valley Bank’s demise sent through the financial system, and the sweeping response the government staged to prevent it from inciting a nationwide bank run, are clearly intensifying the pressure for stronger oversight.“There are a lot of signs of a supervisory failure,” said Kathryn Judge, a financial regulation expert at Columbia Law School, who also noted that it was too early to draw firm conclusions. “We do need more rigorous regulations for large regional banks that more accurately reflect the risks these banks can pose to the financial system,” she said.The call for tougher bank rules echoes the aftermath of 2008, when risky bets by big financial firms helped to plunge the United States into a deep recession and exposed blind spots in bank oversight. The crisis ultimately led to the Dodd-Frank law in 2010, a reform that ushered in a series of more stringent requirements, including wide-ranging “stress tests” that probe a bank’s ability to weather severe economic situations.But some of those rules were lightened — or “tailored” — under Republicans. Randal K. Quarles, who was the Fed’s vice chair for supervision from 2017 to 2021, put a bipartisan law into effect that relaxed some regulations for small and medium-size banks and pushed to make day-to-day Fed supervision simpler and more predictable.Critics have said such changes could have helped pave the way for the problems now plaguing the banking system.“Clearly, there’s a problem with supervision,” said Daniel Tarullo, a former Fed governor who helped shape and enact many post-2008 bank regulations and who is now a professor at Harvard. “The lighter touch on supervision is something that has been a concern for several years now.”Jerome H. Powell, right, the chair of the Federal Reserve, and Randal K. Quarles, then the vice chair for supervision, at the Fed, in 2018. “The events surrounding Silicon Valley Bank demand a thorough, transparent and swift review,” Mr. Powell said in a statement this week.Aaron P. Bernstein/ReutersThe Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco was in charge of overseeing Silicon Valley Bank, and experts across the ideological spectrum are questioning why growing risks at the bank were not halted. The firm grew rapidly and took on a large number of depositors from one vulnerable industry: technology. A large share of the bank’s deposits were uninsured, making customers more likely to run for the exit in a moment of trouble, and the bank had not taken care to protect itself against the financial risks posed by rising interest rates.Worsening the optics of the situation, Greg Becker, the chief executive of Silicon Valley Bank, was until Friday on the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The Fed has said reserve bank directors are not involved in matters related to banking supervision.Questions about bank oversight ultimately come back to roost at the Fed’s board in Washington — which, since the 2008 crisis, has played a heavier role in guiding how banks are overseen day to day.The board has indicated that it will take the concerns seriously, putting its new vice chair of supervision, Michael Barr, in charge of the inquiry into what happened at Silicon Valley Bank, the Fed announced this week.“The events surrounding Silicon Valley Bank demand a thorough, transparent and swift review by the Federal Reserve,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said in a statement.It is unclear how much any one of the 2018 rollbacks would have mattered in the case of Silicon Valley Bank. Under the original postcrisis rules, the bank, which had less than $250 billion in assets, most likely would have faced a full Fed stress test earlier, probably by this year. But the rules for stress tests are complex enough that even that is difficult to pinpoint with certainty.“Nobody can say that without the 2018 rollbacks none of this would have happened,” Ms. Judge said. But “those rules suggested that banks in this size range did not pose a threat to financial stability.”But the government’s dramatic response to Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse, which included saving uninsured depositors and rolling out a Fed rescue program, underlined that even the 16th-largest bank in the country could require major public action.Given that, the Fed will be paying renewed attention to how those banks are treated when it comes to both capital (their financial cushion against losses) and liquidity (their ability to quickly convert assets into cash to pay back depositors).There could be a push, for instance, to lower the threshold at which the more onerous regulations begin to apply. As a result of the 2018 law, some of the stricter rules now kick in when banks have $250 billion in assets.Another major focal point will be the content of stress tests. While banks used to be run through an “adverse” scenario that included creative and unexpected shocks to the system — including, occasionally, a jump in interest rates like the one that bedeviled Silicon Valley Bank — that scenario ended with the deregulatory push.An interest rate shock will be included in this year’s stress test scenarios, but the larger question of what risks are reflected in those exercises and whether they are sufficient is likely to get another look. Many economists had assumed that inflation and interest rates would stay low for a long time — but the pandemic upended that. It now seems clear that bank oversight made the same flawed assumption.The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank could precipitate changes for financial institutions that are not large enough to be considered globally systemic and thus subject to tougher oversight and rules.Jason Henry for The New York TimesMany people were wrong about the staying power of low rates, and “that includes regulators and supervisors, who are supposed to think about: What are the possibilities, and what are the scenarios?” said Jonathan Parker, the head of the finance department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.And there is a bigger challenge laid bare by the current episode: Several financial experts said the run on Silicon Valley Bank was so severe that more capital would not have saved the institution. Its problem, in part, was its huge share of uninsured deposits. Those depositors ran rapidly amid signs of weakness.That could spur greater attention in Congress and among regulators regarding whether deposit insurance needs to be extended more broadly, or whether banks need to be limited in how many uninsured deposits they can hold. And it could prompt a closer look at how uninsured deposits are treated in bank oversight — those deposits have long been looked at as unlikely to run quickly.In an interview, Mr. Quarles pushed back on the idea that the changes made under his watch helped to precipitate Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. But he acknowledged that they had created new regulatory questions — including how to deal with a world in which technology enables very rapid bank runs.“Certainly, none of this resulted from anything that we changed,” Mr. Quarles said. “You had this perfect flow of imperfect information that really increased the speed and intensity of this run.”In the days after the collapse, some Republicans focused on supervisory failures at the Fed, while many Democrats focused on the aftershocks of deregulation and possible wrongdoing by the bank’s executives.“All the regulators had to do was read the reports that Silicon Valley Bank was submitting, and they would have seen the problem,” Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana and a member of the Banking Committee, said on the Senate floor.By contrast, two Senate Democrats — Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut — sent a letter to the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday urging the agencies to investigate whether senior executives involved in the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank had fallen short of their regulatory responsibilities or violated laws.Ms. Warren also unveiled legislation this week, co-sponsored by roughly 50 Democrats in the House and Senate, that would reimpose some of the Dodd-Frank requirements that were rolled back in 2018, including regular stress testing.Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio and chairman of the Banking Committee, told reporters that he intended to hold a hearing examining what happened “as soon as we can.”Mr. Barr, who started at the Fed last summer, was already reviewing a number of the Fed’s regulations to try to determine whether they were appropriately stern — a reality that had spurred intense lobbying as financial institutions resisted tougher oversight.But the episode could make those counterefforts more challenging.Late on Monday, the Bank Policy Institute, which represents 40 large banks and financial services companies, emailed journalists a list of its positions, including claims that the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank were caused by “primarily a failure of management and supervision rather than regulation” and that the panic surrounding the collapses proved how resilient big banks were to stress, since they were largely unaffected by it.The trade group also emailed those talking points to congressional Democrats, but other trade groups, including the American Bankers Association, have stayed silent, according to a person familiar with the matter.“We share President Biden’s confidence in the nation’s banking system,” a spokesman with the American Bankers Association said. “Every American should know that their accounts are safe and their deposits are protected. Our industry will work with the administration, regulators and Congress to further bolster that trust.”The fallout could also kill big banks’ attempts to roll back regulations that they say are inefficient. The largest banks had wanted the Fed to stop forcing them to hold cash equivalents to what they say are safe securities like U.S. government debt. But Silicon Valley Bank’s failure was caused in part by its decision to keep a large portion of depositors’ cash in longer-dated U.S. Treasury bonds, which lost value as interest rates rose.“This definitely underscores why it is important that there be some capital requirement against government-backed securities,” said Sheila Bair, a former chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.Catie Edmondson More

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    Can the United Farm Workers of California Rise Again?

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    Veronica Mota marched under the sweltering sun, hoisting a cloth banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe above her head for miles.“Sí, se puede,” she chanted in unison with dozens of other farmworkers, who waved U.S. and Mexican flags as they walked along two-lane roads lined by dense orange groves in the Central Valley of California.The banner, flags and rallying cry — “Yes, we can” — echoed back more than half a century to when Cesar Chavez, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers union, led agricultural workers on a pilgrimage along a similar route to meet lawmakers in Sacramento.“We are a legacy of Cesar Chavez,” said Ms. Mota, 47, who, when blisters began to form on her feet during the 24-day trek in August, gathered strength by thinking of how the march in the 1960s led to groundbreaking farmworker reforms and propelled the U.F.W. to national prominence.“We can achieve what we want,” Ms. Mota said.What the farmworkers wanted last summer was for Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign into law a bill that they argued would make it easier and less intimidating for workers to vote in union elections — a key step, they believed, in rebuilding the size and influence of a now far less prolific U.F.W. But changing a rule is not the same as changing the game. The question now is whether the U.F.W. can show it has not irretrievably lost its organizing touch and can regain the ability to mobilize public opinion on its behalf as it did under Mr. Chavez.The union is a shadow of what it was decades ago. Membership hovers around 5,500 farmworkers, less than 2 percent of the state’s agricultural work force, compared with 60,000 in the 1970s. In the same period, the number of growers covered by U.F.W. contracts has fallen to 22 from about 150. The march last summer stood as a reckoning of sorts for a union desperate to regain its relevance.California’s fields provide about half of the produce grown in the United States for domestic consumption.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesFarmworkers at an orange grove outside Fresno.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesU.F.W. officials say they have secured contracts focusing on health coverage.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesLabor organizing has rebounded nationwide in the last few years, with unions winning elections at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island and at least 275 Starbucks stores, and among white-collar workers in the tech and media industries. But in California’s fields, which supply about half of the produce grown in the United States for the domestic market, such efforts have found little traction.It has been more than five years since the U.F.W. mounted an organizing drive and election petition in the state — at Premiere Raspberries in Watsonville. The U.F.W. unionization vote succeeded, but the company refused to negotiate a contract and in 2020 announced plans to shut down and lay off more than 300 workers.Ms. Mota, who has worked seasonal jobs around the state for two decades, has seen her wages drop by about $6,000 over the last several years. She is now earning around $15,000 a year. She said that on farms without union contracts, bosses sometimes make veiled threats about cutting hours, refuse to give workers breaks in 100-plus degree weather and turn a blind eye to dangerous conditions.“Where we do not have a union contract, there is no respect,” she said in Spanish on a recent morning from her ranch-style home in the farming town of Madera.But the bill backed by Ms. Mota, which Mr. Newsom signed into law after the marchers arrived in Sacramento, has fueled a cautious optimism. Backers say the ability to more freely organize will help them gain more influence.“There is new energy, new legislation and attention from the public in terms of workers’ rights,” said Christian Paiz, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who has researched farm labor in the state. “We could be on the front lines of a renaissance.”The Shadow of Cesar ChavezFarmworkers have, for generations and by design, existed on the fringes of the American work force.The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 excluded farm and domestic workers from federal protections — a decision, rooted in racism, that ensured that the Black, Latino and Asian people whose work opportunities were largely limited to those two industries were not covered.But by the 1960s, momentum for change was building.Farm workers on their march from Delano to Sacramento in 1966.Jon Lewis/Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityMr. Chavez, who was a farm laborer picking avocados and peas before becoming a grass-roots organizer, teamed up with Dolores Huerta, a young workers’ rights activist from the Central Valley, and in 1962 they founded the National Farm Workers Association. It became the U.F.W.Labor Organizing and Union DrivesA New Inquiry?: A committee led by Senator Bernie Sanders will hold a vote to open an investigation into federal labor law violations by major corporations and subpoena Howard Schultz, the chief executive of Starbucks, as the first witness.Whitney Museum: After more than a year of bargaining, the cultural institution and its employees are moving forward with a deal that will significantly raise pay and improve job security.Mining Strike: Hundreds of coal miners in Alabama have been told by their union that they can start returning to work before a contract deal has been reached, bringing an end to one of the longest mining strikes in U.S. history.Gag Rules: The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that it is generally illegal for companies to offer severance agreements that require confidentiality and nondisparagement.Three years later, it was a key force behind the Delano grape workers’ strike, in which thousands of Mexican and Filipino farmworkers walked off their jobs, demanding raises from $1.25 to $1.40 an hour, as well as elections that could pave the way for unionization.As the striking farmworkers made their way along the 335-mile trek in 1966, which started in Delano, the group grew steadily, and other unions began to pledge their support.In the Bay Area, longshoremen had refused to load shipments of grapes that hadn’t been picked by unionized workers and, before long, a statewide pressure campaign had become a national one.Weeks after the march began, a lawyer for Schenley Industries, a large Central Valley grape grower that was a target of the boycott, contacted Mr. Chavez, and the company soon agreed to negotiate a contract. It officially recognized the U.F.W., making it the first major corporation to acknowledge a farm union.The grape workers’ strike stretched into the summer of 1970, when widespread consumer boycotts forced major growers to sign on to collective bargaining agreements between the union and several thousand workers.In the years that followed, Mr. Chavez forged a relationship with Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and helped champion the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975, which established the right to collective bargaining for farmworkers and created a board to enforce the act and arbitrate labor fights between workers and growers. It was the first law in the country guaranteeing protections to farm workers.Cesar Chavez, center, leader of the National Farm Workers Association, outside a farm in 1966, with supporters bearing signs proclaiming “Strike.” The association was a predecessor of the United Farm Workers.Paul Fusco/Magnum PhotosBut the union’s gains soon began to erode. Mr. Brown’s Republican successor, George Deukmejian, and his appointees made changes to the farm labor board in the 1980s and cut funding, arguing that the adjustments were necessary to correct an “easily perceived bias” in favor of farm workers and the U.F.W. and against growers. And even when the union has won elections, it has often faced legal challenges from growers that can drag on for years.The law that Mr. Newsom signed last year, Assembly Bill 2183, was the union’s biggest legislative victory in years. It paved the way for farmworkers to vote in union elections without in-person election sites. For years, U.F.W. officials argued that dwindling membership numbers stemmed from fears about voting in person at sites often held on properties owned by the growers.The bill faced opposition from growers, who contended that the measure would allow union organizers to unfairly influence the process. Mr. Newsom initially voiced reticence, but signed the measure into law after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden publicly pushed him to do so.“In the state with the largest population of farmworkers, the least we owe them is an easier path to make a free and fair choice to organize a union,” Mr. Biden said at the time.Supporters of the measure highlight how the demographics of farmworkers have changed over the years. In the 1970s, under Mr. Chavez, many farmworkers were U.S. citizens, but migration from Mexico and Central America in the decades that followed created a work force composed primarily of undocumented workers. Because they lack immigration papers, supporters say, they are especially vulnerable. (Undocumented workers can be covered by labor agreements.)In signing the measure, Mr. Newsom and the U.F.W. agreed to support follow-up compromise legislation that would guard farmworker confidentiality during elections and place limits on card-check voting, a method in which employees sign cards in favor of unionizing.‘We Are Ignored’Last summer, as she marched past vineyards and groves of mandarin oranges, Ms. Mota thought of the harvest cycle that has defined much of her life.She reflected on the dormant season, in December and January, when she prunes pistachio and almond trees, and the rainy months, when it’s sometimes hard to find work. But then comes the prosperous citrus and grape harvests, through the spring and the fall, which always make her think of the families who will eventually toast with wine squeezed from the fruit she plucked from the vine.“I love for my hands to harvest a fruit and then seeing those fruits and vegetables in the restaurant,” Ms. Mota said.U.F.W. supporters marched last year to urge Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign a bill that would make it easier for workers to vote in union elections.Jessica Christian/San Francisco Chronicle, via Associated PressShe thought, too, about the invisibility and dangers of her work — the tiny teeth marks etched into her leather boot by a snake bite, the molehill where she badly sprained her ankle, the co-worker airlifted to San Francisco with injuries.“We are ignored,” she said.Still, she didn’t feel that way during the march, where in many towns people greeted them with snacks, Gatorade and full meals. While the group was in Stockton, an inland port city, Ms. Huerta, now 92, stood before the crowd wearing a baseball cap emblazoned with the words, “Sí se puede.”“You all have made me so proud,” she told them.Ms. Huerta, who helped negotiate the first farmworker contract with Schenley, left U.F.W. leadership more than two decades ago to pursue other causes. But in an interview, she said the need for unionization remained as high as it was when she helped start the union.“Farmworkers wanted the support and still want the support,” said Ms. Huerta, who attributed the dearth of contracts to a refusal by growers to bargain in good faith.Despite setbacks in recent decades, U.F.W. officials say they have continued to secure contracts that focus on health care benefits, wage increases and cultivating a respectful culture between farmworkers and employees. At Monterey Mushrooms, which has operated under a contract since the 1980s, U.F.W. officials say the average annual income for a mushroom picker is $45,000 and includes vacation time and a pension. (The statewide average for farmworkers is between $20,000 and $25,000 a year, according to the U.S. Labor Department.)“With a union contract, workers are educated about their rights and empowered to defend them,” said Teresa Romero, the union’s president.Issues might vary from farm to farm, Ms. Romero said. “In one workplace it may be low wages, in another it may be unsafe conditions, in still another it may be the workplace culture — having to pay bribes or endure sexual harassment to get work or having a particular supervisor who is racist or cruel,” she said. “We understand the immense risks that workers are taking when speaking up on the job; it takes courage for workers to form their union.”Dolores Huerta, a founder of the U.F.W., at a rally in the 1970s.Cathy Murphy/Getty ImagesMs. Romero said she was confident that the new state law — along with a streamlined federal process to protect workers involved in labor disputes surrounding immigration threats from employers — would translate into more bargaining power and more contracts.A Question of StrategySome labor watchers are skeptical of the union’s ability to reinvigorate itself.Miriam Pawel, an author who has written extensively about the union and Mr. Chavez, said the U.F.W.’s decline reflected a shortfall in organizing efforts in the communities where farmworkers live.“It’s evolved more into an advocacy organization and walked away from the more difficult work of organizing,” Ms. Pawel said. Referring to the 1975 labor relations act, she added, “They have the most favorable labor law in the country and have barely taken advantage.”Ms. Pawel cited a 2016 state law mandating that agricultural employers pay overtime if people worked more than eight hours in a day. The union lobbied for the measure, but growers warned that they couldn’t afford to pay overtime and would adjust schedules to avoid doing so. The new overtime rule has been phased in over the years, and some farmworkers have voiced anger about losing hours.“If the union were stronger in the fields, and at organizing, it could have won elections and demanded better overtime provisions in contracts,” Ms. Pawel said.Ms. Romero pushed back against such criticism, arguing that, until Mr. Newsom signed A.B. 2183 in September, many farmworkers had justified fears that, if they sought unionization, their bosses would fire them or even try to get them deported.Indeed, a report by the University of California, Merced, Community and Labor Center found that 36 percent of farmworkers said they would not file a report against their employer for failing to comply with workplace safety rules and that 64 percent cited fear of employer retaliation or job loss.And since the bill’s passage, the Farm Employers Labor Service, a trade group that staunchly opposed the law, has placed advertisements on Spanish-language radio stations, warning about what it means to be in a union. In one ad, a man shouts: “Signing a union petition can lead to the union stealing 3 percent of your salary! Do not let them!”Those messages deeply concern Ms. Romero.“Filing for an election when workers are not protected from genuine risks of retaliation will only lead already poor people into further hardship,” she said. “This is the implicit threat that the growers’ power depends on.”‘They Just Want to Work’Joe Del Bosque at his melon farm in Firebaugh, Calif. He has never had a union contract and plans to keep it that way.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesMany California growers say they can be better bosses without unions.On a recent afternoon off Interstate 5 in the small city of Firebaugh, Joe Del Bosque stared out at bare fields on the melon farm he has owned since 1985. A thick fog hung over the area, and the ground was puddled from rain water. It was the quiet season on the farm, where he employs more than 100 farmworkers annually.Mr. Del Bosque said that when he was a boy, his parents, legal U.S. residents, traveled from a town near the California-Mexico border to the Central Valley to pick melons every summer. As a farm owner, he has never had a union contract, and aims to keep it that way.He provides his employees with good conditions and fair wages, he said, without their having to pay union dues. “From my experience, workers who are moving around from season to season do not want the extra hands involved,” he said of the union. “They just want to work.”He said he had little trouble finding field hands, including migrants who move from farm to farm with each season. And he noted that in the Salinas Valley — closer to the coast, where housing is more expensive — many growers rely on H-2A visas, which let them bring workers, often from Mexico, for just a few months of the year.That impermanence, he said, works against the U.F.W. “If the workers are here only a few months a year and then leave the state, how are you going to organize?” he said.Mr. Del Bosque said that he respected the U.F.W.’s history and the groundwork of Mr. Chavez and Ms. Huerta, but that he opposed A.B. 2183. The law, he contends, will allow the U.F.W. to unfairly sway farmworkers at their kitchen tables and behind closed doors.“That’s the intimidation factor,” Mr. Del Bosque said.A New Spirit of ActivismAsuncion Ponce began harvesting grapes in the late 1980s. He says bosses on unionized farms “don’t mess with you.”Mark Abramson for The New York TimesWhile the impact of the law remains unclear, it has buoyed the spirits of some farmworkers.Asuncion Ponce started harvesting grapes along the rolling green hills of the Central Valley in the late 1980s. Through the decades, Mr. Ponce has worked on several farms with U.F.W. contracts. Bosses on those farms, he said, seemed aware that if they harassed or mistreated workers, the union would step in.“They don’t mess with you any more,” he said, “because they think there could be problems.”Even so, he has seen his financial security decline. He averaged $20,000 a year in the 1990s and 2000s, he said, but these days he brings in around $10,000 a year picking grapes and pruning pistachio trees. His eight-hour shifts are no longer supplemented by overtime, as growers have cut hours — partly as a result of the overtime bill U.F.W. leaders supported.Occasionally, Mr. Ponce said, he relied on third-party contractors, who growers sometimes employ, to find him available work. But he said he was optimistic that with the new legislation he would land a full-time job on a union farm.On a recent evening, the 66-year-old sipped coffee and decompressed after a shift at a farm outside of Fresno. His feet ached and his flannel shirt was stained with fertilizer, but he is happy that his job lets him spend all day outdoors — a passion born in his hometown in the Mexican state of Puebla, where he harvested corn and anise.He smiled softly under his white mustache as he spoke about the legacy of Mr. Chavez, which inspired him to join for several legs of the pilgrimage last summer.“I marched for many reasons,” he said in Spanish. “So we are not as harassed and mistreated as we are now in the fields, so benefits and better treatment come our way.”For Ms. Mota, joining the march helped awaken a new spirit of activism.Over the years, she said, she felt afraid to talk about unionizing at work, but now she tells any colleagues who will listen about the advantages she sees: the ability to negotiate a better salary, benefits and a respect for seniority.Her viewpoint was shaped in her early years as a farmworker. “Throughout the years I have realized that we are marginalized,” she said. “They don’t value us.”Once, she said, she watched as a farmer grabbed a knife used to harvest cantaloupe and put it to the cheek of another worker. He glared into the farmworker’s eyes, she said, and called the workers his slaves.“You feel humiliated,” she said, fighting back tears.She is convinced that having a strong union is the only answer. “We deserve a dignified life in this country,” she said.“Throughout the years I have realized that we are marginalized,” Veronica Mota said.Mark Abramson for The New York Times More